The Hutt gargles a reply. The box translates: “WE PERFORM…WORK FOR HIM. HE PROVIDES US WITH WEAPONS, EQUIPMENT, SUPPLIES. WHATEVER I ASK.”
Work? What work is the Hutt doing for Rax? That means her role goes beyond merely allowing him passage. Suddenly it dawns on her: What Anchorite Kolob said, about children being stolen? What if the Hutt’s people are doing the abducting? The Empire needs children…
The slave-boys advance upon her. Slowly. Step by step. Their blades swish at the air. Their blasters thrust and point.
“Children,” she says. “You bring him children.”
The Hutt says nothing. But that silence is telling.
“Did Rax tell you where he’s going?” Sloane asks. “Did he tell you what he’s doing out there beyond your canyons?”
One-word response: “NO.”
The Hutt’s face betrays the monotone of the translator box—the slug’s eye, the one ringed by glittering metal embedded in the flesh, opens wider.
A sign of curiosity, Sloane thinks. Good. She presses the advantage: “Don’t you want to know?”
“TELL ME.”
And yet, Sloane hesitates to say more.
If she gives this up, she’s giving up more than information. What waits out there in the sand is perhaps useful not just to her, but to the whole Empire. The trooper said it was a weapons facility. Sloane dismissed that idea at first, but maybe there really is something there. Rax is no fool. If he wants it, she wants it, too.
The slaves continue creeping toward her.
They’re going to kill me. Or turn me into one of them. She flashes on that: her and Brentin, bleached white, painted with blood-red dust, kissing the rotten flesh of this wretched slime-snake. Their “mistress.”
She tries to imagine the Empire that she will one day rule: And the image of it, once strong in her head, is now a fading picture, like a painting under floodwater, its colors running, bleaching to the point of oblivion.
It’s ruined. It’s over. There is no Empire.
I’ll never be the Emperor of anything.
The Hutt is right. I’m no grand admiral.
I have my revenge and only that.
That decides it. She hurriedly tells the Hutt:
“What’s out there is a weapon. You let me go—you let me get Rax—and you can have it.” The Hutt dismisses it with a wave of her long-fingered hand, and the slaves advance. Brentin cries out as they smash his face harder into the stone. Sloane feels her blood pulsing in her neck like a bird trapped in a tightening grip. She keeps talking: “The weapon out there is bigger than any Death Star we’ve ever built. Imagine it. Imagine it being not in our hands, and not in the hands of the New Republic, but in the hands of the Hutts. Your hands. It is a weapon built for a god. Or…a goddess.”
It’s a deception. She has no idea what the weapon is. Or if it’s a weapon at all. But if the lie gets her passage, lets her survive…
Niima’s hand goes up, quivering fingers splayed out.
The Hutt-slaves cease their advance.
“Mendee-ya jah-jee bargon. Achuta kuna payuska Granee Ad-mee-rall.”
The words echo louder when the box translates them:
“WE HAVE A DEAL, GRAND ADMIRAL. YOU MAY PASS. YOU WILL TAKE ME TO THE WEAPONS FACILITY.”
“Take you? No, I must go—”
Alone.
But the Hutt is already turning around, slithering back toward the tunnels. Her slaves are again struggling to get underneath her, and when they do, they lift her up back toward the nearest chamber.
As she slithers forward, the Hutt says, translated:
“COME, GRAND ADMIRAL. MY TEMPLE AWAITS. FIRST WE FEAST. THEN AT DAWN WE LEAVE.”
They call him the old veteran, which is funny because he’s only ten years old. But he’s been here longer than all the other kids. Refugees come and refugees go, all from worlds either damaged in war or where the Empire was run off, leaving only chaos in the absence. Some of the children stay for one wave, two, even three—but eventually someone comes, someone fancy, and adopts them.
But not Mapo.
Mapo, with one ear gone, half his face looking like the business end of a woodworking rasp. The scar tissue, like bad ground, runs up from his jaw, over the hole that used to be his ear, and to his scalp. The hair doesn’t grow there. For a while he tried growing the rest of his hair out and letting it fall over that side like a river going over a waterfall, but the maven said it just made him look even less approachable.
(As if such a thing were possible.)
His arm on that side, too, isn’t so good anymore. It’s bent and hanging half useless like the arm of some clumsy blurrg. It works. But not well.
Now he stands in the Plaza of the Catalan, on the far side of the Silver Fountain. Theed is a city of plazas and fountains, but Mapo likes this one the best. The kids call it the mountain fountain, what with the way the jets of arcing water make the shape of a mountainous peak, a peak that towers easily over those gathered here in the plaza to watch the tik-tak birds or paint the Gallo Mountains far beyond the capital’s margins.